Cosmos, microcosmos, and agency

(NB: I'm writing this to avoid a current gap in my writing process.)

When Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about the cosmos, he sometimes hears complaints that man is meaningless in the scale of the cosmos. First of all, I have to admit that I think those people are intrinsically misguided. Apparently some people think that life only has meaning according to its magnitude in space and time: microbes matter little, and by extension ad absurdum, whales must live much more meaning than humans. Anyway, NGT responds by pointing out how humans can participate in the cosmic ballet of matter that extends from the origins of time itself through supernovae, yadda yadda. This sense of the organic universe views all human action as part of a cosmic whole. NGT extends this view to say that anyone with a cosmic sense can do no wrong: they start no wars, they burn no fossil fuels, etc. It's an extremely aristocratic worldview: even the starving orphan in a war zone participates in the ballet of cosmic matter, and therefore the educated elite who, like Tyson, can worship at the altar of cosmology, can do no wrong. NGT presents a warmed-over cosmology borrowed from Pope, Whatever is, is RIGHT.

How does NGT define the universe? The answer is important, because it is the all-beautiful whole in which we all participate: the definition of the universe is, then, the definition of NGT's sense of moral order. NGT defines the cosmos according to current instrumentation and mathematics available to astronomers. He is aggressively agnostic about any existence before the Big Bang--which, by the way, he refers to as a "fact" of reality, rather than an inference from cosmological data. I digress... NGT precludes many of the traditional senses of "cosmos," which John Bulwer first used in 16th century English to express the sum of material and immaterial domains.  Beauty is inextricably linked to Bulwer's sense of "cosmos": "As the greater World is called Cosmus from the beauty thereof." Beauty, in NGT's cosmos, clings closely to astronomical observation: matter is beautiful; stars are beautiful. Beauty itself? I can't speculate how NGT would formulate his agnostic materialist aesthetics.

Define the universe too narrowly, and you may identify a "greatest good" that's entirely a local phenomenon. Consider the plastisphere:

The two researchers collected pieces of plastic from various sites in the North Atlantic. They then examined each using DNA analysis, and also an electron microscope, to see what was living on it. Lots of things were. Altogether, they discovered about 50 species of single-celled plant, animal and bacterial life. Each bit of debris was, in effect, a tiny ecosystem.
As with many ecosystems, the bottom of the food chain was occupied by things that photosynthesise. These included unicellular algae called diatoms and dinoflagellates, and photosynthetic bacteria known as cyanobacteria. Usually, such creatures swim freely in the ocean. They therefore have to work hard to stay near the surface, where light for photosynthesis is abundant. By hitching a ride on a piece of floating plastic, they can stay near the surface without effort.
Where plants abound, herbivores will not be far behind. These, Dr Mincer and Dr Amaral-Zettler found in the form of dinoflagellates, some of which like to snack on smaller creatures to supplement their photosynthesis. They also found predators on the herbivores, in the form of ciliates (a type of protozoan) and predator bacteria, which feed on other bacteria. Except for top predators—the type that themselves prey on predators—the two researchers thus discovered a classic web of food chains of the sort familiar from ecology text books. And they also, and perhaps most pertinently from the human point of view, found evidence for one other part of such a food web: the decomposers.

A bottled ecosystem, like the plastisphere, may "believe" in a cosmology, in the sense that it operates according to the rules intrinsic in its material environment. In the plastisphere, energy is abundant: either in the form of sunlight or plastic. In the plastisphere, predators are an impossibility: the material conditions for apex predators are impossible inside each 750mL ecosystem. And in the plastisphere, the existence of humanity is a useless abstraction. Each plastisphere, like NGT's universe, abides by material rules that seem to be internally consistent but arbitrary beyond a certain level of abstraction. Ultimately, the plastic-eating bacteria thriving in each plastisphere will puncture the walls of their bottled environment. The universe, meaning the plastisphere, will descend and decay into the sea.

I'm not really invested in making a parallel between each environment, except to say that some definitions of the universe provide the basis of ethical systems. A definition of the human universe as material and indifferent to human action can lead, on the one hand, to NGT's disregard of war or terrestrial resources. On the other hand, a universe that's been defined as careless to the suffering of orphans, or the destruction of a human ecosystem, will promote ethical systems that disregard the plastification of the oceans on the homeworld of mankind--a bottle ecosystem.

Writing Journal 1252.27.2.14

Before:
I have to churn out a draft of an application letter. The plan so far is to fill out some paragraphs in the standard oratorical format. But some of the challenges involve higher-level concerns, namely tone. I don't know exactly what my audience wants to hear, so I don't know how to pare down my details. Anyway, I think my main thesis is to explain how this seminar relates directly to my dissertation project. I'll appraise my progress by the clock, I guess. Or better I, should first write each of my topic sentences, then fill out the paragraphs that follow in a second phase. I want to at least have two pages done in the next two-and-a-half hours. The challenge will follow from my time restraint: I must write calmly and assuredly. But fortunately, I do have skills to write effective topic sentences and to build paragraphs out of topic sentences. The problem will be preventing myself from distracting myself. So far, I'm planning to use the timer to set short goals, like 50 words in 5 minutes, in multiple reps.
After:
I wrote the first 270 words of actual text, aside from my notes. But I lost steam when I hit a problematic sentence.

Quote sandwich: Moral Letters to Lucillus 2.2; What is America?

Be careful, however, lest this reading of many authors and books of every sort may tend to make you discursive and unsteady. You must linger among a limited number of master thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind. Everywhere means nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends. And the same thing must hold true of men who seek intimate acquaintance with no single author, but visit them all in a hasty and hurried manner.

I like this quote by Seneca, both as it resembles my own thoughts about the "work" of the humanities and the peril of travel.

Most of the day-by-day work of an academic in the humanities depends on "grokking" other thinkers, and sometimes across great rhetorical divides. A classicist has to be conversant with feminist theory, or psychoanalysis, or ecological thought, all while reaching for a profound connection with the classics. Specialists may traffic in interdisciplinarity, but ultimately to serve as ambassadors to their primary sources.

Disciplinary thought--both "disciplinary" in the sense of academic disciplines, and "disciplinary" in the sense of self-commitment towards a set of procedures--requires the humanist to "linger among a limited number of master thinkers." And Seneca juxtaposes this process with travel, the un-lingering. GK Chesterton, likewise, finds that travel flattens the world so that the mind can roll over it without real interruption.

I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind. At least a man must make a double effort of moral humility and imaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind. Indeed there is something touching and even tragic about the thought of the thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like. This is not meant for nonsense; still less is it meant for the silliest sort of nonsense, which is cynicism. The human bond that he feels at home is not an illusion. On the contrary, it is rather an inner reality. Man is inside all men. In a real sense any man may be inside any men. But to travel is to leave the inside and draw dangerously near the outside. So long as he thought of men in the abstract, like naked toiling figures in some classic frieze, merely as those who labour and love their children and die, he was thinking the fundamental truth about them. By going to look at their unfamiliar manners and customs he is inviting them to disguise themselves in fantastic masks and costumes. Many modern internationalists talk as if men of different nationalities had only to meet and mix and understand each other. In reality that is the moment of supreme danger—the moment when they meet. We might shiver, as at the old euphemism by which a meeting meant a duel.

But I think there's a fundamental difference between Seneca and Chesterton, and that's the difference between the aristocratic Stoic and the democratic Christian. Whereas Seneca wants to bend the individual away from the world and towards excellence, Chesterton wants to collide the individual against the mob in some semblance of the sinner's collision with transcendent goodness. Moreover, Chesterton sees all individuals as fundamentally equivalent in sin. Seneca writes, "Withdraw into yourself, as far as you can. Associate with those who will make a better man of you. Welcome those whom you yourself can improve. The process is mutual; for men learn while they teach." In other words, Seneca sees evil outside, and goodness in the sages. Chesterton, however, sees evil within, and goodness in a transcendent, other-ed Christ, prefigured by the other: "The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."

Lesson planning: The table of my memory

Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain
Unmixed with baser matter. . .  Hamlet 1.5.95-104

For the past two weeks my students have been footnoting and annotating the mit shakespeare. It's been an awkward teaching position: my duty has been to sit and wait for questions, then to quickly resolve the umpteen requests that all arrive at once. It's a very hurry-up-and-wait kind of work.

Tomorrow, my class is back to the normal mode of lecture, discussion, and activity. But I really want to expound on the importance of the work my students have done as editors. So I'm going to revisit the subject of bibliography with more activities.

Towards an XML-free future, reflection

I was introduced to the digital humanities through XML. Therefore, "Towards an XML-free future for the digital humanities" shocked me when I first read it. Digital humanities without XML sounded like gluten-free bagels or vegan meatloaf. But now I've had time to digest it, and I have a new appreciation for Desmond Schmidt's argument. In short, XML is losing its foothold among "real" programmers, and soon digital humanists will be forced to follow "real" programmers as they migrate over to REST or JSON.

Conal Tuohy, Paul Ryan, and Michael Kay all raise a common objection in the comments: JSON might be better at messaging between programs but XML seems to remain the standard of human-readable documents. This controversy inspires two stages of reflection in me:

1. At first, I agreed heartily with Desmond Schmidt. I abandoned a plan for an XML-based Shakespeare class because, in conversation with H. Lewis Ulman, I decided that the "human readable" XML imposed so many constraints that it would distract from my learning objectives. Instead, my students work in traditional text editors (or collaborate in Google docs), and I transform their output in Scalar.
2. The truth is that I'm strategically agnostic about this debate. I'm committed to Scalar in the near-term, and Scalar serializes API results as either RDF-XML or RDF-JSON. Ultimately, I don't care whether the bagels have gluten or not, as long as I get my schmear.

Making the grade, pt. 2

A reminder of my thoughts on grading:

• the audience of a grade is a student 
• the goal of a grade is change

In the last "Making the grade" post, I detailed some problems with numerical grades, at least as they fail to help students understand how to change.

Change is central to "Standards Based Grading." In the rubric, below, you'll see that I use seven columns: Insufficient Work Shown, Not Yet Competent, Not Meeting Goals, Limited Progress toward Goals, In Progress toward Goals, Meeting Goals, and Exceeding Goals. I arrived at these criteria after hearing about them on NPR. I have to admit, though, I don't understand the difference between "insufficient work shown" and "not yet competent." I'm using those because I may find a situation that fits the bill in the course of the semester.

	Insufficient Work Shown	Not Yet Competent	Not Meeting Goals	Limited Progress toward Goals	In Progress toward Goals	Meeting Goals	Exceeding Goals
“I can adjust reading strategies to different genres.”				1 Jan. 15 Jan.	29 Jan.	5 Feb.
“I can perceive argumentative structure.”					1 Jan. 15 Jan.	29 Jan. 5 Feb.
“I can reconstruct rhetorical context.”	1 Jan.			15 Jan.		29 Jan.	5 Feb.
“I can assimilate unfamiliar views and values.”				1 Jan. 15 Jan. 29 Jan.		5 Feb.
“I can read other cultures' codes.”	1 Jan.			15 Jan.		29 Jan.	5 Feb.
“I can read and write complex vocabulary and syntax.”				1 Jan. 15 Jan.	29 Jan.	5 Feb.

This semester I'm teaching "Introduction to Shakespeare," a second-level class at Ohio State. I've taught second-level English classes for several semesters in the past, and I know that many students struggle with difficult texts. I worked backwards from the challenges of difficult texts to design the Journal Sequence, a series of five assignments that would nudge students towards six skills for understanding difficult texts. Those skills became the criteria listed in the left-hand column, above.

My students have five chances to master these skills, such as "perceiving argumentative structure." Therefore I don't assign a grade based on the average of five numerical grades. Instead, I put a date in the relevant box to indicate that, on this day, this student showed this kind of progress towards this standard. Over the course of the semester, my students ought to gradually improve and ultimately meet the goals outlined in the rubric.

Lastly: compare the amount of information available to the student in the rubric, above, compared to the hypothetical grades, below:

Journal 1	86.00%
Journal 2	75.00%
Journal 3	80.00%
Journal 4	83.00%
Journal 5	82.00%
Average/Total	81.20%

I'm confident my students can learn how to change from the former better than the latter.

Internet of things, orchestra of things

Alternate title: I have no mouth and I must sing.

When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time in front of a non-networked computer in my family's basement writing music on Finale. After I got bored with that, I spent a lot of time trying to make noise with Finale. I got really interested in exhausting the limitations of MIDI instruments, in the same way that Dan Deacon did in Bromst. But I'm also interested in people using noise to make music. The Bit-52s are a networked assemblage of things that perform live music.

Both Bromst and the Bit-52s break instruments from the functions assigned to them. They show hidden powers to their respective instruments. And I relate that subject to object-oriented ontology.

When I talk about object-oriented ontology, I'm really doing two things:

1. Making mistaken claims about OOO
2. Defying functional fixedness

One of these days I'll have to read Democracy of Objects. I think I have time. OOO will probably come of age when we really start dealing with the Internet of Things. The Internet of Things, like Bromst, will start broadcasting the hidden powers of objects. And when the vast majority of the internet is a bee-loud thrum of the hive of objects, we will find ourselves suddenly already in a world of objects: objects with mouthless voices and musical static.

Making the grade pt. 1

A few words on grading, from the instructor's point of view:

• the audience of a grade is a student 
• the goal of a grade is change

I used to worry a lot about precision in grading. Precision--the grouping of the arrows on the target, rather than their proximity to the bullseye--can still be achieved even in the context of inaccuracy. Accuracy--the proximity of an arrow to the bullseye--may be impossible in the humanities. One humanist may create a mental model of a student paper that's entirely different than another humanist's mental model. These differences are even greater when expressed on a 100-point scale. What's the difference between a grade of 86 and 87? What's the difference between a B and a B+? How many angels can fit on the head of a pin? In the face of this uncertainty, I decided that I could at least be self-consistent. Therefore I drew up a rubric before every assignment and tried to apply the same criteria to every student paper. I also had an ulterior motive: if I graded every problem exactly the same, then I could compile a list of "most common problems" as I graded, copy-and-paste when necessary, and then use that list to indicate where my students were struggling.

The problem with precision--real or implied--is that it doesn't really connect with the audience. Even if I have a nuanced and particular understanding of the difference between 86% and 87%, I doubt that my students do. Whether my students interpret these differences as optimistically as wearied O-Chem students or as pessimistically as entitled over-achievers, neither would align with my personal kabbalah of quantitative interpretation.

The bottom line: If the students don't understand the grades, they can't change.

Next time: Standards-Based Grading

I was a teenage cartographer pt. 1

Short story: my first summer job in college was for the Montgomery County Auditor. I combed through old property records and drew parcels on an ArcGIS map. I learned a lot from the experience, but most recently I'm reminded of the high difficulty starting a new system of mapping.

For my Scalar Shakespeare project, I want to compile a post a comprehensive map of Shakespearean locations. The problem is that it's difficult to learn Google Maps' KML interface. When all else fails, read the directions...

First, I have to install various geegaws--namely, the google docs app for chrome and google earth--which I prefer not to do on principle. But that all worked out eventually.

Next, I have to dredge through student journals for the locations used throughout the plays. That's a chore because I have to plug in text into google, and then grab lat/long data from there.

Ultimately, I can't resolve the problem of linking between locations. I can't figure out how to describe "Placemark ID" in a way that works with the spreadsheet.

Anyway, here's your friggin' map.


View Larger Map

Writing Journal 2014.2.19.0849

Before:
I have to work more on a review piece. The task is pretty straightforward, so my only metric for success is word count. That's actually a bit of a challenge, I think. I currently perceive my job as grinding out words, but this isn't hack writing. This is an opportunity for me to perform a lit review and hopefully get credit for it. So I need to draw on any skills I have as a rhetorician or salesman. As such, a better metric for success may be to write four or five rhetorical zingers throughout the piece. The other challenge will be to be free from distractions, but that's not really been a problem this morning. If I feel distracted, I'll just tune into some noise-rock.
After:
I didn't get a great deal done in my first half-hour period because somebody I know was upset about a work issue and I had to talk it through with her.
The second timer didn't go well either, but this time I distracted myself.
The third timer went better. I'm closing in on the end of this section.

Writing Journal 1856.17.2.14

Before:
I want to sketch out an argument to merge recent bibliographical findings about plays in parts and recent narratological arguments about character narration. There's many ways to do the hook, but I think the deepest question is whether each side is talking about the same thin: whether the bibliographer's text is the same as the narratologist's. I think the cleverest answer is to say that the observation of character narration is the best way to both critique and improve the text. I'll know how well I'm doing based on the completeness of each idea as I try to sketch out the entire document.
After:
I feel that I've scratched my itch for the moment. I'm also feeling a bit more tired than when I started.

Writing Journal 0918.17.2.14

Before:
I had a bit of a struggle with the last draft of the PFF statement of interest. Did I know my undertaking, tactics, and the measurement of my value? Maybe I faltered in the perceived value of my undertaking. I'm not sure that I had a great understanding of my skills and progress in this undertaking.
After:
Argh... I'm distracted again. I have trouble concentrating with other people typing noisily in the same room, and I also have trouble concentrating with the internet nearby.

Writing Journal 0800.17.2.14

Before:
This morning I have to follow up on the PFF document. There are a lot of feelings wrapped up in this process--especially given that a colleague just got a position that I envy--which can be both productive and counter-productive given that I have to explain my own position to the graduate school. But the graduate school doesn't need me to pour out my heart; they want to see that I can benefit from the specific mentorship that I can offer.
... I just caught myself drifting off and looking at another site! It started as an excusable violation, but in the end it yielded procrastination.
My immediate task is to tell the narrative of my teaching experience. As the name implies, I'll just string together my experiences in narrative form. I'll be tempted to measure my progress by my comprehensiveness, but I have to think rhetorically: the audience wants to see that I'm committed to improving my teaching. The challenge will be modelling that audience--do they want to see overachievers or needy cases. Instead I'll describe my development and then highlight a few areas for further progress, which is a tactic I've developed and employed in the past. Right now the trick will be to deny myself the internet, which is a boundless distraction machine.
After:
I got some sentences down, but I got distracted by a combination of the internet and the wife. I can't blame anyone but myself. I'm probably too tired to completely focus. I'm also not doing a very good job of translating my transient thoughts into writing--that is, I could be using my distraction to break from the functional fixedness of this document, but instead I'm simply breaking from the task before me.

Writing Journal 1446.16.2.14

Before:
The task for the next half hour is to invent the argument of my Statement of Interest for Preparing Future Faculty.
The task is to write about my reasons to apply for PFF, my teaching experience, and my academic career goals. I think I'll begin by fitting these areas into the rhetorical arrangement: exordium (my academic career goals); narratio (my teaching experience); and confirmatio (my reasons to apply for PFF). I'll measure my progress by the degree to which I've filled out each claim and connected it to the next. I see that the challenge will be to construct a model of the audience. But I believe my skill is to write clearly and effectively towards a known goal.
After:
I wrote 140 words. The narratio covers my limited background and relates that to the schools I want to see. I don't think it's very flashy, but it's meaty. The one trick was when I pulled a list of target activities from the PFF informational sheet.

Writing Journal, general introduction

I'm going to be sharing my writing journal on this blog, both to provide some public accountability for my writing habits and also to share some ideas about how academic work happens (to "de-mystify academic labor," as the brilliant Professor Renker says it).

As a general procedure, my writing process follows four steps.

1. Set a procrastination timer. I use a kitchen timer to resist akrasia, that is, to bind my future self to the plans of my past self.
2. When the timer goes off, I have to write a journal about the state of flow. In a few sentences, I try to settle my thinking on seven topics:
1. What to do.
2. How to do it.
3. How to assess progress.
4. Where to go.
5. Challenges.
6. Skills.
7. Isolation (from distractions).
3. I write for thirty minutes. Again, I use the kitchen timer.
4. At the end, I add a little reflection to my writing journal.